A Brief History of E-commerce

Internet shopping is not only convenient and easy, but an efficient time-saver and a great way to compare virtually any kind of item one is interested in. The history of e-commerce has a short time line but which is an interesting one. E-commerce and its underlying technology have been around just for the past few decades. Read on to look into the brief history of e-commerce.

The e-commerce technologies first appeared in the late 1970’s. The execution of electronic transactions between businesses as well as the exchange of information took place in the form of electronic purchase orders and invoices. The Boston Computer Exchange started in 1982, and was one of the first known examples of e-commerce. Abundance of credit cards, ATM machines and telephone banking throughout the 1980’s was the next important step in the history of e-commerce. By the early 90’s, e-commerce would also incorporate things such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), data warehousing and data mining.

But it wasn’t until the late 90’s, as the history of e-commerce reflects, things really began to get warm up. High speed internet connections such as DSL, introduction of security protocols and quicker online transaction capability gave a boost to e-commerce, where an explosive growth was predicted by the industry experts.

By 2000, a considerable number of businesses in United States and Europe built out their first elementary e-commerce websites. The prospect of serving a global customer base electronically emboldened traditional businesses. In the next coming years, online business to business transactions grew exponentially, as we look into the history of e-commerce. Over $700 billion dollars in sales were recorded.

Some of the major pioneers of e-commerce like eBay and Amazon soon became the leaders.
First to establish prominent e-commerce brands, some of the major categories are computers, books, music, and a variety of electronics. Some other companies and industry giants followed such as Dell, Staples, Office Depot, and Hewlett Packard and soon became the most recognizable e-commerce brands online.

We hope you found the brief history of e-commerce informative and useful.